Slaxxor

I bought the Orange Box about three weeks ago, and now that I’ve had plenty of time to play with it, I think it’s time for a review. The Orange Box as an overall package really is the best deal I’ve ever seen in a game package. It’s not at all over-hyped. I could see a pack of games of this quality selling for 49.95 maybe a year or two years after it came out, not on the first day. Any one of the included games would be worth $50 to me, with the possible exception of Portal, which is quite short, but a gem nonetheless. For reference, the Orange Box includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. If you already have HL2 and/or E1 on your account, they will become available as a gift, which you can give to anyone you like with a Steam account.

Portal: $20 by itself on Steam, or $50 in the Orange Box - **4.5 Stars**

I hadn’t read much about Portal when I bought the Orange Box, but it looked interesting, so it was the second thing I played, after Team Fortress 2. It’s an amazingly well-done first person puzzle game, and is one of the most novel and entertaining games I’ve ever played. You play as an android who is participating in a testing program run by a company called Aperture Science. You are given a gun that shoots portals. The gun (after the first few levels, where you gain upgrades) can shoot 2 simultaneous portals, one blue and one orange. When you walk through one, you come out the other. In order to complete the puzzles, you’ll have to do a combination of walking through portals to access otherwise unreachable areas, jumping through portals (your momentum is unaffected, so if you fall at high speed into a portal on the floor, you can launch yourself out of a linked portal on the wall with great speed), throwing objects through portals, etc. The puzzles are challenging and rewarding, but none are so hard as to be uncompleteable. Throughout the game you are guided by a computerized voice, called GlaDOS. She (yes, she’s a she) helps you learn the ropes and guide you through the tests, and is one of my favorite parts of the game. Some of her comments are so utterly hilarious that I was forced to stop in the middle of the puzzle I was working on and just laugh and pound my desk. I don’t want to give anything away regarding the game’s resolution, but I’ll just say this: watch the credits. The credits feature a song, and the song makes them the BEST credits ever seen in the gaming community, and make the credits an immaculate ending for what I feel is a flawless game. The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is because the game took me less than two hours to complete. It has some replay value due to the entertaining narration and Advanced Maps and Challenges unlockable upon completion, but I was starving for more puzzles when I beat the game. From what I’ve heard, the game was really a test by Valve of the portal gun, which may be used in future games, possibly even a future Half Life game. The possibilities are endless. In addition, if you’re feeling adventurous, there is a fairly simple method that allows you to play the maps from Half Life 2 with the portal gun. I’ll post the link when I get home (at school right now) or it can be found easily on Google. Team Fortress 2: $30 by itself on Steam, or $50 in OB - **5 Stars**

TF2 is really the only reason I bought the Orange Box at all. I enjoyed HL2, but I never was obsessed with it enough to play through all of Episode 1. However, when Valve announced that HL2:E2 would include TF2, there was really no decision. The first videos of Team Fortress captivated me, and now that TF2 is finally (finally, finally, finally) here, it’s completely worth the wait. The graphics are highly stylized, almost cartoonish, but instead of being a fault (some people have criticized the game for its cartoonish style), this enhances the game’s feel and experience. The designers of TF2 stated that because all shooters are destined to be unrealistic in some aspect, instead of trying to make up for it with hyperrealistic graphics, they would exaggerate in the other direction. The physics in the game are also unreal, but insanely fun, featuring Soldiers and Demomen launching themselves into the air using explosions and double-jumping scouts. The combination of style and physics make this game a perfect blend, and the end result is a game that is fun to play and, at times, hilarious. I think that this game is more similar in gameplay to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory than Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it’s quasi-sequel, is, due to its smaller map size, more emphasized team work, and pure fun to play. Quake Wars is great, but its gameplay is much more like the Battlefield games, with the much larger maps and vehicles. These large sizes can lead to people just rushing to vehicles and trying to play vigilante and kill the whole team themselves. In Team Fortress, Medics team up with Heavies and decimate the enemies, demomen and engineers help each other defend objectives, etc. Teamwork is essential to victory, thanks to extremely well-designed classes and maps. There’s even a few custom maps popping up, and custom-map-dedicated servers. In summary, buy this game: it’s the best multiplayer shooter of the year, and more than likely, the decade.

Regarding HL2:E2, I haven’t actually played all the way through it yet, due to being busy with my “life” and TF2, but when I finish it, I’ll post a review.

Also, there’s a great Flash version of Portal at http://www.portal.wecreatestuff.com. I highly recommend it if you want to see the concept of Portal before shelling out the cash.

I finally did it.  I made my first instructable.  It was very easy, took me about 10 minutes to do.  Hope you enjoy it!  It’s simple but visually pleasing, in my opinion.  That’s all for now

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-create-an-amazing-Enemy-Territory-Quake-Wa/

I finally got around to picking up my reserved copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it is truly stunning. And I haven’t even played the game yet. I’ll get to that in a second. The packaging is very nice looking, and has a nice heft to it. It’s a thick cardboard shell with a slide-out flip case that holds the game installer DVD, the 10 Collector’s Edition trading cards, a keyboard map, the manual, and the Bonus DVD. Don’t let the fact that it’s cardboard and not metal talk you out of buying this, however. The 10 cards added to the 2 that came with the preorder are now taped on my wall encircling the poster that came with the preorder, as well as a PC Gamer cover I taped up there too. It’s a nice little shrine if I do say so myself. ***PICTURES*** I have the pictures on my Flickr, please take a look. It’s awesome. The Collector’s Edition as well as the Regular Edition include an “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Desktop Map Guide.” This desktop map guide is a neat idea. It’s basically a flipbook that sits on your desktop and shows you an overhead photo (simulated satellite shot) of each map included in the game, with starting spawns, primary objectives, an explanation of what the attacking team must do to win, and finally what class you need to be to complete a given objective. It’ll be a great help when I play the maps for the first time, as I won’t have to waste my time stumbling around and getting run over while looking for the objectives. Plus it just looks damn cool.

The reason I haven’t got to play yet is because my reserved name is being very finicky. The issue is detailed here (post on the Enemy Territory Community Forums) but what it boils down to is they screwed up somehow and “There is a problem with your gametag, it is basically stuck in the database. This issue should be correctable, but we will need a little extra time to get it fixed (we will be contacting the appropriate people asap). We will let you know when this problem has been resolved and you can Activate your pre-order name.” That’s the reply I got on my Activision Technical support ticket. From what I’ve read on the QW Forums, they should fix it within the next day, and I’m hoping sometime tonight so I get to try the game. My friend reserved his name about three weeks ago and his processed without trouble, so I’m guessing that between then and when I reserved mine (June 6, 2007) their servers crashed or they misplaced all their data or something… Point is, I preordered the game specifically so I’d be able to get my game immediately and play under my reserved name (SupremeBeing). Although I did wait two days to actually buy the game since its October 2nd release due to my busy schedule, I should’ve been playing it within minutes after installing it. I’m very dissatisfied with Activision’s conduct of the preorder, mainly because the preorder only requires them to do one thing, and that is to keep track of what name I reserved and then give it to me later. They sent the email to me containing a confirmation link to click when I purchased the retail edition of the game, and when I clicked it, instead of seamlessly letting me take possession of my phenomenal name, it gives me an error saying I have the wrong code or wrong activation code or something like that. D- guys, try harder next time.

I will, of course, update you when I get a chance to play some of the other maps included in the retail edition, but for now, I’m waiting for Activision to get their act together. Fun fun fun.

Thanks for reading though

UPDATE: I submitted a ticket on Activision’s technical support site at about 4:00 that afternoon, and the problem was resolved by the time I got home the next day.  I’ve been enjoying the extreme awesomeness of Quake Wars since then.

I have little or not time to write this, but I’m gonna do it anyway, because I’m just that dedicated. I got to spend one glorious hour playing Quake Wars before being whisked off to a college fair thing, and it was one of the best hours of my life. Quake Wars is everything I could’ve hoped for and more. Put simply, “BF2 killer” - IGN. The hitboxes are impeccable, the game runs very smoothly on my mediocre computer, even at full resolution (1440×900) and Normal graphics quality. The gameplay is very similar to that of the game’s inspiration, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free multiplayer sequel to id’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The classes’ roles are all the same, but modernized, and the game as a whole is familiar but not redundant. The medic, for example, has defib paddles instead of a “revive needle”, but the functions are the same. The mouse/aim reaction time (for lack of a better phrase) was great, especially when compared to games like BF2, in which there could be a .5-1.5 second delay between your mouse and the crosshair. The vehicles were fairly easy to control, but difficult enough that practice and skill would give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. The included map, Valley, has its shortcomings, but if it’s par for the ET:QW course, I’m very happy with the game.

That’s all I have time for right now, got an English paper to write before I go to bed, so until tomorrow, goodnight.

P.S. - I’ve got the name SupremeBeing reserved for the game’s official release, so if you decide to use it in the demo, don’t get too attached.

Yeah… I got really tired of doing the “small jobs” for this guy… cause he was being really picky and lazy about it. Anyways, a friend is loaning me a subdomain (Chellberg.Flphost.com) and hosting to start on my very own site. It’ll take a lot of time to get it anywhere near a reader ready state so I’ll keep the blog here for a while. Hopefully Max’ll help me get it looking as professional as his. Either that or I go the cheap route and stick a php theme on there… Anyway, that’ll be fun.

Anyway, today I thought I’d write about X-Plane. X-Plane is an extremely accurate and expansive flight sim (read their description for more bragging) that has scenery files for pretty much the entire planet, plus Mars. You can do any number of things, from flying the Hindenburg to piloting a 747 to landing the Space Shuttle. The control is so realistic (I assume) that it actually makes it difficult and sometimes annoying to fly (could be I’m just bad at it, or that my joystick sucks) but the experience is so engrossingly accurate that for a while you may actually believe that you’re flying this plane, and start to get very very nervous as you stall into a dive and red-out from the excessively high g’s.

The first plane I flew was the 747, and I couldn’t get it to move for about 25 minutes. Turned out I had to take off the brake, haha. After I got that taken care of, I was able to easily take off and climb up to about 30,000 feet. Then I started to ignore the stick and play with the extensive buttons on the on-screen controls. Pretty much anything you click on the screen will do something to the plane, normally bad. Example: I clicked the “Dump Fuel” button. About a minute later I crashed. It takes a bit of setup to get the controls working, especially if you don’t want to have to stop and try to fumble the stick with your left hand while using your right hand to click the tiny controls. Other than that, X-Plane is a very scenic, accurate, and enjoyable flight simulator, whose $70 price tag is well earned by its vast scenery and aircraft selection. If there’s even a chance you think you’ll like a flight simulator or ever want to be a pilot, this game is for you.